BLINDING US WITH SCIENCE? MAN, MACHINE AND THE MASS IN B MINOR

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) This article originated as a paper for the Fourteenth International Conference on Baroque Music at The Queen's University of Belfast in July 2010; my thanks to Robert Dodson, Director of the School of Music, Boston University, for securing assistance for me to attend the conference. Whatever the case, a preliminary report on the new examination of the autograph, by the musicologist Uwe Wolf and the scientists Oliver Hahn and Timo Wolff, has appeared in the 2009 Bach-Jahrbuch; even without the full exposition of their findings that we might hope will accompany the edition that Uwe Wolf has prepared on commission from the Archiv, the material already presented raises enough questions to warrant discussion.5 Surprisingly, perhaps, Wolf and his colleagues did not employ any of the newer methods of digital analysis that, some more expert than I have told me, have had particular success in sorting out layers of palimpsests, but used the classic method of X-ray fluorescence, or XRF. Resolution, no doubt, of cases where traditional methods of handwriting analysis and textual comparison fail to yield unambiguous conclusions; confirmation of other conclusions regarded as reasonably, but not absolutely, secure; and, surely, corrections of some findings that looked solid enough but that we must now recognize as mistaken. Admittedly, at the time nothing about the spot struck me as suspicious, so I might not have looked as closely as I could have; but a colleague who has recently examined high-resolution digital images of the autograph tells me that even under considerable magnification he could not detect the presence of a c either. 19 See the observations on 'immediate' corrections in MarshallRobert L., The Compositional Process of J. S. Bach: A Study of the Autograph Scores of the Vocal Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), volume 2, 36 . Admittedly, at the time nothing about the spot struck me as suspicious, so I might not have looked as closely as I could have; but a colleague who has recently examined high-resolution digital images of the autograph tells me that even under considerable magnification he could not detect the presence of a c either. 19 See the observations on 'immediate' corrections in MarshallRobert L., The Compositional Process of J. S. Bach: A Study of the Autograph Scores of the Vocal Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), volume 2, 36 .